Everyone Has a Story

Everybody’s got a story

Todd Steiner has devoted his life to saving aquatic creatures. Perhaps
the secret to his success is that he knows what it's like to swim
upstream. The founder of the Sea Turtle Restoration Project (STRP),
Steiner faces the world with an aggressive attitude and a personal
philosophy that provides him with a practical sense of purpose.
"Environmentalists win battles for humanity, but overall we're losing
the war," says Steiner. "But what choice do you have but to fight?"

After receiving his Masters in biology from Florida International
University, Steiner studied reptiles and amphibians in Everglades
National Park. In 1985, he moved to California and began volunteering
with Earth Island, then in its infancy.

"When I arrived at the Earth Island office, it was a loft above a
lesbian-collective vegetarian restaurant," Steiner recalls. "The entire
space was smaller than Earth Island's lobby is now. At the time,
Rainforest Action Network was a desk, the Environmental Project on
Central America was a desk. The International Rivers Network shared a
desk with IMMP. Earth Island was a desk! I walked in: within 15
minutes, they had me handling the money. That's how loose things were
back then."

Shortly thereafter, Steiner was hired as director of the Dolphin
Project, and was inspired to start STRP in 1989. "When you're just
getting started, Earth Island provides a foundation so you don't have
to go through all the administrative hassles of getting your own
non-profit going. It allows you to jump right into program work," says
Steiner.

In 1999, STRP left Earth Island to become independent. Steiner's team
now consists of nine permanent employees, plus numerous contract
employees and interns. With offices in Texas, Costa Rica, and
California, STRP is an advocacy group working to ensure the rights of
sea turtles are met around the globe. To do so, Steiner admits that a
great deal of groundwork has to be done in the United States first. "We
can't be going and telling other countries what they should be doing if
we're not doing the right thing. The first thing to do is to compel the
United States to take the moral high ground. Simultaneously, because we
can't wait for that to happen, we have to make some headway into
various international bodies that can potentially take some action," he
says.

The approach Steiner and his coworkers are taking has been very
successful to date. Since its inception, STRP has achieved several
important goals in both the United States and abroad. With
approximately 4,000 members and the collaborative support of
like-minded organizations, the organization has closed two million
square miles of ocean to longliners, released 40,000 endangered sea
turtle hatchlings to the sea, and had an important turtle nesting beach
designated as a national wildlife refuge in Nicaragua.

"Right now, we've taken on the challenge of trying to ban two
industrial fishing technologies that are destroying the oceans -
long-lining and gill netting," says Steiner. "This is a major
challenge: most of the nations of the world are involved in these two
technologies. Longline fishing at this point is putting out between 2.5
and 10 billion hooks per year. And it's taking sea turtles, dolphins,
whales, sea lions, and too many fish. We've always seen our role as a
catalyst to encourage the large national and international
environmental organizations to take on these issues."

Besides at least six working trips a year, Steiner manages to squeeze
in what he makes sound like a hobby: saving salmon. The Lagunitas Creek
watershed in Marin County, where the STRP office is located, is home to
the largest remaining population of wild coho salmon in California.
Steiner's second project, the Salmon Protection and Watershed Network
(SPAWN), works to protect the coho.

"I founded SPAWN as an antidote to the sea turtle project, which is
primarily advocacy work, and it's aggressive, and it's litigious, and
it's fighting. The idea behind SPAWN was to give us an opportunity to
do hands-on restoration projects," says Steiner. "We've rescued more
than 6,000 fish from streams where they would have surely died because
of lack of water."

Throughout his lifetime, Earth Island's founder David Brower promoted
what he called CPR for the planet: conservation, preservation, and
restoration. Although it's been a few years since Steiner has had a
direct link with Earth Island, he continues to embrace Brower's model,
and is bound to keep making waves as he does.